At the stump of the necks there was a great deal of tissue and vertebrae hanging out like party confetti. No clean slice was evident. Someone…or something…had the strength to actually pull a man’s head from his body. Dirker didn’t like to jump to fantastic conclusions like that, but what else was he to think? The evidence spoke volumes.
Sighing, as used to the carnage now as he would ever get, he looked over the shacks and weathered buildings that had made up Sunrise in its heyday before the veins of gold had played out. It looked like a cemetery to him…the gray, windowless structures very much like tombstones in some lonesome, windy graveyard. The mountains brooding above looked down silently like mourners.
A miner named Jim Tomlinson had ridden down from the high country to provision at the store and found the massacre. He was so overwrought by the time he made it to Whisper Lake, Doc West had to shoot some morphine into him to get anything sensible out of him. An hour later, Dirker, West, and two deputies-Henry Wilcox and Pete Slade-made it up to Sunrise.
Henry Wilcox-a man who’d seen his fair share of blood and guts-took one look at what was in the store and promptly ran outside to vomit. The other three were inclined to do the same, but held their own.
Massacre was what Tomlinson had called it and massacre is what it was. Period. There was no way to tell just yet how many had been killed. Corpses and parts thereof where littered about like bison carcasses at a buffalo camp. The bar was heaped with dismembered limbs…legs, arms, hands, feet. Some hands still gripped pistols and some legs still wore their boots. There was blood everywhere, oceans of it dried in sticky pools on the floor and splashed on the walls and spattered up onto the ceiling. Tables had been overturned, chairs shattered to firewood. Sacks of salt and flour had ripped open, their contents powdered over everything like a down of snow. Poker chips and playing cards scattered in every which direction.
Slaughter, plain and simple.
The store had sold everything from picks and shovels to Rochester lamps and sluice boxes. One of the picks had been put to good use-it had been used to impale a man to the wall, his feet a good six inches off the floor. Dirker couldn’t even begin to imagine the strength it would take to do something like that.
And if all of that was bad enough down here, upstairs…Jesus, even worse.
Like a slaughterhouse. The corridor was actually painted red like a child’s fingerpainting, filled with bodies and limbs and viscera. Dirker didn’t do much exploring up there-the sight and smell of all that spilled blood and raw human meat was simply too much for any man-but what he had seen was enough to haunt his dreams forever. Whoever or whatever had been at work up there, had taken their time. Unlike downstairs which was, save a few grisly examples, like a free-for-all just this side of Hell, in the upstairs corridor, the fiends had been in no hurry whatsoever.
Five bodies had been ritually pulled apart-limbs and heads cut from torsos-and then reassembled on the walls where they had been nailed in place. Dirker suppose that was evidence of a sick, grim sense of humor. When he first saw it, he thought he was looking at bloody manikins, but the truth found him soon enough. He hadn’t bothered with the other rooms up there. No doubt they hid more horrors, but he simply wasn’t up to it.
Downstairs with Doc West, Dirker watched the medical man examine the bodies. He probed punctures and gashes with instruments, measured wounds and abrasions. Dirker was thinking about the others. About the miners that had disappeared up in the hills these past months. And the ones that had been mauled by animals…at least what he had thought were animals.
Now, well, he knew better.
But if it wasn’t animals, then what? Lunatics with dogs?
There were bullet holes everywhere-in the walls, the ceiling. Slugs had ripped through barrels of salt pork and jerky, had shattered the liquor bottles behind the bar. Shotgun blasts had blown holes in tabletops and pellets were peppered in the plank flooring.
Doc West sighed. Examined an obvious bite mark in a woman’s buttocks. “Some sort of animal did this…but the spacing of the teeth, I just don’t know. Like the others before.” He stood up slowly, a immense weight bearing down on him. “These people were killed in a number of ways. Some were shot. Others stabbed. Still others had their throats torn out or were eviscerated. But, ultimately, they were all partially eaten. Killed for sport and for food. And as a bonus, most of them were scalped.”
That was a new wrinkle, Dirker knew. The other bodies they had found in weeks previous had not been scalped.
Dirker cleared his throat. “So we’ve got ourselves a pack of animals that carry weapons and scalp folks like Indians?”
“ That would be correct, yes.”
Dirker licked his lips with a tongue dry as sandpaper. “The scalping…we’d better keep that to ourselves. People hear that and they’ll be running Indians again.”
Doc West nodded. “We had better keep most of this to ourselves.”
Dirker walked back outside, to get that abattoir stink out of his face. Outside the wind blew and howled amongst the leaning, ramshackle structures. In his mind, it was the wail of ghosts demanding justice. He thought of the bounty he had put out. The one on the animals he had hoped were responsible. So far, hunters brought in three pathetic black bear, two slat-thin wolves, and a badger of all things.
It would have been mildly humorous, if it weren’t so terrible.
Henry Wilcox was leaning against the shack across the road. The door was open and there was another body sprawled in there. This one had taken a load of double-ought at point-blank range. Probably the only truly normal death in Sunrise.
Wilcox and Dirker avoided looking at each other.
Dirker, his belly filled with something like wet sand, followed the muddy, overgrown road up amongst the empty buildings. The killers had impaled a series of heads on waist-high stakes to mark the path. Considerate of them. They had found three other bodies in one of the shacks-an old assay office. They had been hung by the feet and disemboweled. Dirker tried to suck in fresh air, but all he could smell was decomposed, maggoty death.
There was a gray false-fronted building at the very end with boarded-over windows. Dirker hadn’t checked that one yet. He supposed he had to, like it or not.
He had to kick the door free of its hinges to get in.
And right away he smelled it-a wet and rancid stink. Feeble sunlight filtered in through gaping rents in the walls where boards had peeled loose. Motes of dust danced in the beams. The building had been something of a hotel once, but the furnishings had long ago been stripped away. Even the staircase leading above had been purloined, probably for firewood. It was dirty in there, shadowy and dank like a crypt. There was a bloody handprint on the faded wallpaper, a single bootprint pressed into the settled dust.
Dirker, sucking in a lungful of stale air, walked over to a door that was open maybe an inch. He could hear the wind whistling through holes in the roof, making the building groan and creak and tremble. There were another noises, too…the buzzing of insects. Meatflies, no doubt.
Dirker grasped the door, yanked it open.
A man stood there before him.
Stood stock still for a split second, then fell straight forward like a post and almost knocked Dirker on his ass. Dirker let out a little strangled cry, but the man was dead. A bubble of hysterical laughter slid up the sheriff’s throat, but he would not set it free.
Just another corpse, that’s all. The insides hollowed out, the face covered in flies. In the room behind him, there was dried blood everywhere. Bloody bootprints led to a window where planks had been knocked free.
Dirker left the corpse there and made for the door.
He heard the sound of hooves hammering up the road.
He knew it was Pete Slade riding back in, but for moment, one moment he thought that maybe it was-
Outside, Slade was speaking with Wilcox. Dirker made his way over to them.
“ Anything?” he said.
Slade just shook his head, stroking his mustache. “I followed the tracks up pretty high. I’m figuring seven horses, but no sign of animal with ‘em, dogs or otherwise. About three miles from here, the riders cut into a stream. I followed it for a mile or so…but I saw nothing that made me think they ever cut up the bank.” He pulled a cigar butt from the pocket of his leather vest, stuck it in his mouth. He did not light it, just chewed on it. “That stream winds through the mountains for miles and miles. Maybe if we had some dogs, we could cast for
